Retro Gaming is a funny thing, we’ve seen romhacks, homebrews, FPGAs and emulators, so you’d think we’d have exhausted all options by now.
Turns out that’s not the case, because a new scene cropped up right under our noses: HD Graphics packs for NES games. That is to say, you take the original NES rom, run it with the Mesen emulator and add a community-made graphics pack on top of it which will drastically update its visuals.
These can range from minor graphical updates, to 16-bit and even near 32-bit style graphical updates and depending on the graphics pack, they can look incredible! Let’s get one thing straight, these are not ports or remakes, they are the original games running with a graphical overlay on top of them.
The advantage here, is the game play just like original NES games because THEY ARE the original NES games, except now, they’re prettier. Retro Gaming Youtuber, St1ka (that’s me), created a video showing several examples of these graphics packs and it’s well worth checking out:
